One Brand Went From 8 Localised Sites to 22

Slash-uk, slash-de, slash-fr. Count them up. Job done.

That method was wrong, and it was wrong in the direction that makes you underestimate everyone.

We switched to reading the hreflang declarations instead, which is the site telling search engines, in its own markup, exactly which localised versions it maintains.

One brand went from 8 to 22 overnight. Not because they launched anything. Because we finally asked the site instead of guessing from the path.

Four of those 22 were not on the main domain at all. Two subdomains for Australia and the US, plus separate sites for India and Japan. If you were counting slashes, you would have missed a third of their footprint, including two entire national markets.

Twenty-two declarations, four of them on their own hosts.

Four separate hosts. Think about what that costs. Four sets of local pricing, four sets of legal pages, four returns policies, four currencies, four customer support inboxes that have to speak the right language, on top of the eighteen paths on the main domain.

A localised site is not a translation. It is a commitment with a payroll behind it, and counting them tells you where a company is genuinely trying to win rather than where it happens to ship.

That is why the number goes on the benchmark row and nowhere else. If you are deciding whether to enter a market, "they have a real site there" and "they will ship there" are two completely different pieces of information, and only one of them should worry you.

The nice part is it cost nothing to add. We were already fetching the homepage for other checks, and the declaration was sitting in the markup the whole time. No new request, no new bill.

What it does not tell you is how good those sites are. A declared hreflang can point at a machine-translated shell with a broken checkout, and we cannot tell that from the declaration. Go and load two of them and see for yourself, ideally on your phone, ideally on the market you are considering.

One thing to do next: view source on your closest competitor's homepage and search for "hreflang".

Count what comes back. Then count yours.